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The four of us made a trek to the Middle of Nowhere, to a cabin with my Mom, my brother, his wife, and The Niece. The Niece is two-and-a-half now, and she and The Girl immediately bonded.
For those who haven't spent time recently in the company of preschool-aged girls, 'bonding' sounds like this:
SQUEAL hee hee hee hee SCREECH hee hee hee SCREECH hee hee hee

In economics, we draw a graph matching the various prices that a good could be sold at with the quantity of that good that people would be willing to buy at each price and call it a “demand curve.” Sloping down, this demand curve can shift for many different reasons. Some of these reasons include changes in the income of the consumers involved, changes in the prices of substitutes or complementary goods, or changes in popularity of the goods themselves. For example, I suspect that the demand curve for horse-drawn carriages has shifted greatly since the advent of the automobile.

A midwestern correspondent writes:
I'm starting a new full-time job next month, and I'm really excited about it. But my new college has a 60 day waiting period between my start date and when I actually receive health insurance. I'm grateful for the job, of course, but I don't understand the 60 days. Do you know why I have to pay for COBRA for two months into a new job?
First, congratulations on the job! In this year's market, that's particularly great news!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the things I noticed on the way to vacation was an increased incidence of wind turbines. I had presumed that it related to the relatively constant breezes typical of many coastal environments. But maybe not.

I've been chewing on Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford's explanation of how the spiritual enervation that came from working for a think tank drove him (no pun intended) to repair motorcycles for a living, and how spiritually ennobling that move was.

Middle-aged readers will remember the popular Saturday Night Live sketch of the 1970s and early 80s-- Mr. Bill. Mr. Bill is an animated puppet with a big white head and simply sketched face that changes expression as Mr. Bill encounters disasters, usually embodied by “Mr. Hands” or “Sluggo.” “Oh Nooooo!” Mr. Bill cries in Hurricane Sluggo (2003) as an alligator opens its big jaws and swallows Mr. Bill while he is waiting on a rooftop in a flooded New Orleans.

Before I got into the higher ed sector, I had a hand in payroll processing for a fairly large corporation. With a lot of different unions. Each with its own contract, and rules, and peculiarities.
Back then, Christmas was a major pain, primarily because of the calendar. Some unthinking individual had scheduled it just before Dec. 31, and for some reason my family expected me to take the whole day off right during the busiest time of the year. (Some years, they even wanted me home on Christmas Eve, as well!)

Last week I went to a lecture by David Montgomery, author of “Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations”. I didn’t expect the lecture to effect me quite as much as it did (I mean, what do you expect from a talk about dirt?). But I have now added a new problem to my list of serious (and interrelated) environmental worries:
-- Climate disruption
--Fisheries collapse/ocean destruction
--Habitat and species loss
--Environmental toxins

My piece last week struck a nerve, it seems, among some childless academics and with at least one person who didn’t comment as a teacher, but as someone working a more nine to five position. The big divide, as this commenter noted, is not really between the parents and those without children, but between folks with flexible work schedules and those without.